There is a good chance that the Suns will not win tonight against the two-time defending champion Miami Heat.

A loss should not change perception a bit. Miami is not the measuring stick of whether the Suns are a good team. Consistency already proved that.

With no need for a rear-view mirror to see how close Western Conference lottery territory lies (three games away), perspective gets lost on how the Suns are one of the better NBA teams and how remarkable it is that they got back there so fast.

The Suns are one of eight NBA teams with a winning percentage of at least .600. They have the ninth-best point differential among all teams. They are one of the top five scoring teams. Their rookie head coach, Jeff Hornacek, looks like the Coach of the Year.

The eye-rubbing, skin-pinching and head-shaking is done after 50 games. What has transformed throughout the franchise is real.

“At this point, they’re not a surprise,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “We’re in the last third of the season. They’re for real. The type of style they’re playing, it’s always interesting. It’s consistent for 20 years that that’s the type of style that they play here in Phoenix and they’ve done a great job of that from a personnel standpoint, building this team with a lot of young, youthful, energetic players, but also Jeff has done a very good job of playing to the team’s strengths.”

The Suns have a chance to double their 25-win total from last season when it appeared the franchise’s rebuilding might take years. What is more impressive about the Suns’ about-face is that they did it without the convenience of adding a major star. All the greatest turnarounds in league history occurred because a superstar was added.

Boston jumped 32 wins with Larry Bird. The Spurs did it twice with David Robinson (plus 35) and Tim Duncan (plus 36). Lew Alcindor gave Milwaukee a 29-win spike while Jason Kidd (Nets) and Carmelo Anthony (Nuggets) were good for 26-win bumps upon arrival. The Suns did it before with Steve Nash (plus-23 in 2005) and Tom Chambers (plus-27 in 1989).

Suns General Manager Ryan McDonough has been a part of a dramatic change as assistant GM in Boston but the Celtics’ 2008 leap from 24 to 66 wins and a championship came by adding former MVP Kevin Garnett and All-Star Ray Allen. In Phoenix, McDonough did it by adding a backup point guard (Eric Bledsoe), an unused big man (Miles Plumlee) and a vagabond streak shooter (Gerald Green). He welcomed back a player off a one-year, heart-scare hiatus (Channing Frye) and hired a rookie head coach (Hornacek) to flip fortunes.

This Suns revival still has a difficult final 32 games, and it’s a stretch few of these players have endured in these greater roles. Their staying power has been understandably doubted, especially with Bledsoe’s injury absence, but what has been constructed is no house of cards.

“We’re out there to try to prove we belong,” Hornacek said. “Miami has obviously proved it. They’re a great team. They’re champions. I think our guys still think of ourselves as new guys trying to prove themselves and not really concerned what we are in record for the league. They just enjoy going out there and playing teams and trying to show what they have.

“We can’t have any slippage. We have hard practices still where maybe a lot of teams don’t but we try to go hard so they are always in that same mode.”

The Suns are not championship-caliber but they are suddenly a lot closer, which is a lot better than spinning wheels at the bottom like Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Orlando and Sacramento.

To far exceed Las Vegas’ 19-win betting line for the season, the 30-20 Suns have succeeded across the board. They have beaten Indiana and Portland twice apiece. They won at the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston. And when they lost at Oklahoma City and San Antonio, they were competitive.

“We have to think that because we can beat anybody,” point guard Goran Dragic said. “If we play unselfish and if we play the right way that we’re supposed to and help on defense and try to play our style of game, then I think we can beat everybody.“

Reach Coro at paul.coro@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-2470. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/paulcoro.

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